Thick Knowledge and Health Care Outcomes

• In Event: 480 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Health Expert Knowledge

Abstract

Do individuals gain from mobilizing both expert knowledge and lay knowledge? If so, what are the foundations? This paper addresses these questions by investigating health care outcomes from the users of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) who mobilize different knowledge bases regarding CAM treatments. By using data from the 2012 US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the paper finds that CAM users have better outcomes when they use CAM treatments that experts (i.e. health care professionals) or lay people (i.e. family/friends/co-workers) recommend, compared to those that nobody recommends. CAM users have even better care outcomes from treatments that both professionals and family/friends/co-workers recommend, compared to those that only professionals or only family/friends/co-workers recommend. The paper conceptualizes this complementarity between expert knowledge and lay knowledge as emerging from the thick knowledge that experts and lay people produce together in mutual embeddedness.

Author

• Jae-Mahn Shim, University of Seoul